Respected colleagues, I'd like to clarify that Comma-delimited and
Tab-delimited files are Not "Excel spreadsheets". That is a low-level
mechanism to import/export data with Excel, as with other
environments. In this market Pick people equate CSV to Excel, but
end-users who use Excel every day don't equate the two. Excel is a
powerful tool that does a Lot of stuff. Plain text columns and rows
pale in their ability to express data compared to rich Excel
worksheets. If someone asks for Excel and you give them CSV/tabbed
files, it's like someone asking for wine and getting water.

[AD] For real Excel spreadsheets from MV, see NebulaXLite:
nospamNebula-RnD.com/products/xlite.htm
[/AD]

The original request was for moving Excel spreadsheets into Universe.
For raw, unformatted data, conversion to CSV is appropriate as that
doesn't bring with it the formatting. But for moving data To Excel as
we've seen discussed here, I strongly urge you to consider options
othr than CSV/tabbed files.

Other web pages on the topic (including solutions to the OP request) :
http://www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?CSV
That links to Universe BASIC code for CSV2ARRAY and CSV2FIELDS.
However note that the solution implies the source data has already
been extracted to CSV, which is what my ExcelExport does.
http://www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki...MicrosoftExcel

HTH
Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com
Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products
worldwide, and provides related development services
remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com/blog
Visit PickWiki.com! Contribute!
http://Twitter.com/TonyGravagno

"Tony Gravagno" <tony_gravagno (AT) nospam (DOT) invalid> wrote

Tony,

I see you point about the OP request - I think I misunderstood that to mean
produce a spreadsheet hence my response.

However, I think that your point about equating CSV to Excel is misdirected.
Just because the method described gets data into Excel, does not imply that
one need stop at that point. We use automation to format the Excel report
and this is all database driven and includes Pivot Table support etc. It
works well IMO - I have no reason to believe that your product doesn't too.

Brett

"Brett Callacher" wrote:
Brett - understood. It wasn't my goal to be all encompassing, just to
make a general point for those to whom it applied. It's very
difficult to express subtleties in this medium and to accommodate too
many of the exceptions, without getting overly verbose - a line which
I believe I crossed once.

"Most" MV developers who are asked for Excel give CSV. Even many
professional IT people who are asked for Excel from their management
will import with CSV and then spend hours to days manually formatting
for readability and aesthetics. I've seen this many times, it was the
inspiration for NebulaXLite. End-users just accept that this is what
comes from their Pick system. It's great that you post-process the
data after import. I believe your users, compared to others, would
have less of an urge to replace the old Pick box with something that
works with their modern tools. As always, I don't care what solutions
are used, just keep your end-users happy, as you're doing, and we'll
all stay in business for a little longer.

Thanks.
T

On Jan 24, 1:22*pm, Tony Gravagno <tony_grava... (AT) nospam (DOT) invalid>
wrote:
I believe I hurt myself when I fell off my chair, laughing!

-Bruce H